Defending Pantheism

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By demonstrating how a given moral statement reduces to a natural fact, the truth of which is wholly independent of some other fact about the existence of gods.  

Just as the sky is not blue if, and only if, there are also gods...a moral fact is not true if, and only if, there are also gods.  Adding and subtracting gods doesn't alter the truth value of some statement that doesn't refer to their existence.

That depends on what the definition of moral statement were operating on. For you the type of moral statement you consider a natural fact, is merely descriptive, is a mere is, such as x causes harm, where as for most people moral statement are not merely descriptive but prescriptive, contain an ought, that one ought not do harm. The ought in your view isn't reducible to a natural fact, reality doesn't provide us moral guidance or instructions in your view, where it does in mind. In your view the  is just based on some subjective agreement between people, and don't exist beyond them, where as in my view reality possess a transcendent moral law, or something akin to that.

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"Pantheism" is simply another superfluous gap label.

It isn't, though, because the pantheist doesn't try to explain any phenomenon in nature using their god concept. To the pantheist, if science (or another reliable investigative method) hasn't found the answer, then humankind simply doesn't know the answer to said question. There is no "godidit" in pantheism. The pantheistic God doesn't do anything. It just is.

The universe is not a "God" of any kind, it is simply a giant weather pattern in which life is simply riding in as a temporary blip.

This assessment of the universe is not at odds with pantheism at all.

We do not need to make up metaphoric language to describe our observations.

You're right there. Calling the universe God is something of a metaphor. But so what? Metaphors can be accurate. Calling a southern abolitionist a "beacon of light shining over dark waters" is a poetic rendering of what the man is. You could more "accurately" say that he was "a man who lived in the south in 1820 whose views concerning slavery differed from those around him."

But you lose something in the second less metaphorical rendering of what the man is. That means that the first rendition, the metaphor, has something that the non-metaphorical description lacks.

That's what interests me about pantheism. It has something that the "ordinary," purely scientific description of the universe lacks. But this doesn't contradict or oppose a naturalistic view of the universe. Again, pantheism makes no claims about the nature of the universe. It simply pronounces the universe holy.

I think Walt Whitman conveys the sentiment best:

"To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle."

What sort of beliefs of yours would you have to lose, or no longer accept, to be more a traditional atheist, than a pantheist? 

Is it mainly your beliefs in things like the numinous, in objective morality, etc.. Would you say it's such aspects as Hitchens describes below, that lead you to refer to reality as possessing something spiritual, holy, to elevate it to the status of God?

"I’m a materialist…yet there is something beyond the material, or not entirely consistent with it, what you could call the Numinous, the Transcendent, or at its best the Ecstatic. […] It’s in certain music, landscape, certain creative work, without this we really would merely be primates. It’s important to appreciate the finesse of that, and religion has done a very good job of enshrining it in music and architecture." -Hitchens